Policy / April 27, 2026
The president’s lies about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting continue a dark trend.
Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Saturday, April 25, 2026.
(Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Donald Trump’s usual sleaze is so repugnant that it erases any sympathy he might deserve, even when he is clearly the target of violence, as he was this weekend, when he survived the third serious assassination attempt against him in the last two years. One reason could be that he seems incapable of being honest about anything that happens to him, including his impending death.
Saturday, a shooter opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) in Washington, which Trump attended for the first time since his presidency; no one was seriously injured and the suspect, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, was quickly apprehended. The previous two attempts took place in 2024, when Trump was running for president. The first, and largest, took place at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, when a gunman shot Trump in the ear. The second took place at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida on September 15, 2024.
Surprisingly, after these three incidents, Trump said blatant untruths.
In 2024, Trump repeatedly blamed Democrats as a whole supported the attacks against him, despite the fact that the motivations of the two would-be assassins were obscure and difficult to attribute to partisan politics. In a message posted on Twitter the day after the Palm Beach events, Trump wrote,
The rhetoric, the lies, as evidenced by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan debate on ABC, and all the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s and then Kamala’s political opponent, ME, have taken politics in our country to a whole new level of hatred, abuse and distrust. Because of this rhetoric from the communist left, the bullets are flying, and the situation will only get worse!
Alleged WHCD Assassin Cole Tomas Allen Wrote Manifesto offering this pattern: “I no longer want to allow a pedophile, a rapist and a traitor to cover my hands with his crimes” – a reference that any reasonable person could associate with Trump. On Sunday, Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump on 60 minutesOr they had this exchange after quoting the manifesto:
Trump: I knew you would [read that] because you are horrible people, horrible people. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anyone. I am not a pedophile.
O’Donnell: Oh, you think he was referring to you?
Trump: …You shouldn’t read that on 60 Minutes. You are a shame
Speaking on Fox News the same day, Trump said from Allen: “When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians. That’s a sure thing. He hates Christians, a hatred.”
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This is another false statement. Like journalist Ken Klippenstein documented in an excellent article published on his Substack, Allen is in fact an apparently devout Christian, whose faith almost certainly partly motivated the assassination attempt. Allen belonged to a Christian community as a university student and refers to his faith in the manifesto, taking great care to address religious objections to the assassination.
As Klippenstein details:
Allen’s Bluesky social media account also contains repeated references to Christianity, including one from earlier this month in which he identifies “as a Protestant” and repeated comparisons of Trump to the Antichrist.
On April 13, in response to Trump’s image as Jesus Christ, Allen replied quoting a verse from Revelation about the Antichrist that now reads as foreshadowing:
“There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, nor for everyone who receives the mark of his name. »
Trump’s lies have consequences. Political violence in the United States, while currently at a lower level than in previous tumultuous eras like the 1960s, is still pervasive enough to have its own set of rituals. One of the most important is the coming together of both parties to denounce the violence. The other is to ensure that blame is placed exclusively on the perpetrator and not used to vilify broader groups. Trump is incapable of making these basic gestures of courtesy. As The New York Times Remarks“Trump often uses violent language” and his “frequent lies about the 2020 election led some of his supporters to violently attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Dylan Byers, senior correspondent Puck who attended WHCD, went to a nearby sports bar after the shooting. He was struck by the fact that the guests at the bar apparently seemed uninterested in the assassination attempt. In fact, the bartender allowed Byers and other reporters to watch CNN briefly before switching the channel back to a hockey game.
For Byers, this incident reflects a public failure. On Twitter, he job“It’s disturbing to see how desensitized so many people have become – to the shootings, obviously, but also to the political violence and the abnormality of the moment.”
But there are many reasons for the public to lose interest in the event. On the one hand, Trump has already downplayed the horror of the assassination attempts through his past politicization and lies. He continued this pattern in using WHCD shooting to advocate for his tacky plans to turn the West Wing into a ballroom and bunker.
Plus, it’s hard to worry about an assassination attempt when all manner of violence, much of it incited by Trump, is taking place on a much larger scale, including Ice Murders and the ongoing war in Iran. Recently, Trump threat that “an entire civilization would die” if Iran did not agree to surrender, a genocidal wish that was apparently forgotten by the journalists who happily rubbed shoulders with the president on Saturday.
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We should not downplay the horrors of the killings. All political violence must be condemned. But condemning political violence also requires us to recognize that Trump’s violence and dishonesty are also worthy of rebuke.
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Damn Lord Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, Time of the Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of Art lovers: the adventures of Françoise Mouly in comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, The guardian, The New RepublicAnd The Boston Globe.
